How long before SSD's render older designs obsolete?

Father Ted

Father Ted

Father Ted

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With the advantages that they bring in terms of speed, reliability and quietness above others, there must come a point one day when the older technology HDD's will be outsold by the new SSD's.
I suppose the main factor will be price, when the cost of an SSD falls so that it becomes more financially viable then obviously they will sell in greater numbers.
What do you think? How long before SSD's outsell traditional HDD's?
 
Some years yet. Considering how cheap you can get a traditional drive for, they will need to come down in price a lot for the PC manufacturers to put them in as standard.
 
Indeed, 5-10 years i'd wager a guess untill they become mainstream.

Can see a scenario where they kick in earlier for high-end laptops though. Also possible, high-end PC's configured with SSD "OS" drives and a additional, conventional large Hard disk?
 
Duke said:
Some years yet. Considering how cheap you can get a traditional drive for, they will need to come down in price a lot for the PC manufacturers to put them in as standard.
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I agree. Added to that the fact that the conventional hard disk will be perfectly fine as storage drives for years to come.
 
Conventional hard drives are only going to get bigger and bigger.
And as far as data storage needs go they fit the bill perfectly.
Plenty of space, fast enougth to do the job and most inportantly, there cheep.
I cant see SSD's being used for more than boot drives in any full size PC.
Possibly more so in laptops though due to low power usage, heat and so forth.
 
Personally I think there will be a cut-off point where SSD drives fit certain demographics, and manufacturers follow suit. Investing R&D into larger platter drives won't be cost effective for them past that point.

This point is probably where SSD drives that are "big enough" for most users (say, around 300G) and also reach a price that "most users" can afford. I'd guess that point is around £200. Harddrives will be relegated to "cheap, slow, big storage" and be limited to mostly external backup devices. Harddrive manufacturers will push into the new SSD territory hard, after all, they have new economies of scale and profits to be made from them. Platter based HDs must be really tight.

SSDs are easily marketable to regular users - they are faster, quieter, more reliable, possibly lighter (good for laptops), lower power consumption. They have already been making inroads on high end laptops for the last year or so. They are now already the same capacity as most laptop drives, certainly when Intel bring out their 320G one they will be.

I think SSDs will continue marching into laptop land, and in about a year, 18 months tops, they will dominate that area. The manufacturers are smart, that's why they've all been making them 2.5" scale. This will make the drives cheaper, then they'll move more into the desktop market. I think the change will be quite fast, 3 years tops, for most PCs to be sold with SSDs, with platter drives being relegated to backup devices.
 
Mechanical drives are now as cheap as 5p/GB and it's only get to get cheaper as they continue to get larger. They've gone from 333GB platters to 500GB in about a year and though it gets increasingly harder form them I expect we'll see 1TB at some point allowing for 4TB drives at least. Mechanical drives are also plenty fast enough for storage of data.
It's going to be forever until SSD prices can take over unfortunately. Currently the price per GB for them is about 30x that of mech drives.
 
Even though mechanical drives have jumped in size, there will be a point where manufacturers will move R&D to SSD devices more, especially as most people don't need 2TB drives in their desktop and would probably prefer a speedier, quieter and more power efficient drive.
 
I think it'll be a good 5 - 10 years before SSD becomes mainstream, only once they compete on a price basis will they find there way into standard PCs.
 
ssds have halved in price for equivalent performance over the last 12 months, far faster than hdds. I see OS drives being SSD in almost all laptops in 18 months, and in mid-range up desktops, 18 months. Then I see large, slow, cheap SSDs taking over from HDDs in the storage business.
 
Father Ted said:
With the advantages that they bring in terms of speed, reliability and quietness above others, there must come a point one day when the older technology HDD's will be outsold by the new SSD's.
I suppose the main factor will be price, when the cost of an SSD falls so that it becomes more financially viable then obviously they will sell in greater numbers.
What do you think? How long before SSD's outsell traditional HDD's?
Click to expand...

As people have said, when SSDs come down in price then we should be seeing them as standard in desktop PCs.

Personally I'm waiting until I can get 2x 250GB SSD drives for a decent price so I can raid them to replace my current 2x250GB RAID :).

I'm not too bothered about storage speed, but obviously my storage drives will eventually be SSD.
 
Even allowing for halfing in price every year it'll take SSD 4 years to catch up with mechanical drives today on price/capacity, which will of course have moved on more in the intervening years.
 
if corsair made an S256 it most likely be the last drive i get for an long time i can see this S128 one i got running out of space at some point, for the time as it was the Corsair S128 is good bargain, we do not need faster Data rate SSDs we need cheaper and 256gb or bigger SSDs

(RAID+SSD not needed with second gen SSDs buy the size you need)
 
Jokester said:
Even allowing for halfing in price every year it'll take SSD 4 years to catch up with mechanical drives today on price/capacity, which will of course have moved on more in the intervening years.
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This is true. Laptops are a bit behind though; I reckon SSDs will have wholly replaced HDDs in new laptops within 3 years. Although netbook SSDs are surely very cheap to produce? Admittedly, they're small and slow, but surely even cheap per GB? That's where I see SSD storage going.
 
I think that HDDs will be around for a long, long time (in computer terms anyway). Ten years or so I would guess.

I think that over the next 5 years or so HDDs will gradually become standard as large, cheap storage. They already rival optical media for price per unit storage, and are a lot more convenient. I see SSDs taking the place of HDDs in notebook computers very quickly, and more gradually in desktops, but with the use of external HDDs for storage being commonplace.
 
HDD's will still be around for a while yet, SSD's will be around in the current form factor for a while, but will be also available in PCI-e format for much faster speeds.
 
I've got a 30gb vertex drive for my OS & Office. Doesn't sound much but i've got 8gb free (windows 7 install). Everything else i dump on a standard hdd
 
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